I grant that I’m later even than usual in doing my readership recap. That news about how to get rid of the awful awful awful Block Editor was too important to not give last Wednesday’s publication slot. But let me get back to the self-preening and self-examination that people always seem to like and that I never take any lessons from.
In April 2021 there were 3,016 page views recorded here, according to WordPress. These came from 2,298 unique visitors. These are some impressive-looking numbers, especially given that in April I only published nine pieces. And one of those was the readership report for March.
The 3,016 page views is appreciably above the running mean of 2,267.9 views per month for the twelve months leading up to April. It’s also above the running median of 2,266.5 for the twelve months before. And, per posting, the apparent growth is the more impressive. This averages at 335.1 views per posting. The twelve-month running mean was 185.5 views per posting, and twelve-month running median 161.0.
Similarly, unique visitors are well above the averages. 2,298 unique visitors in April is well above the running mean of 1,589.9, and the running median of 1,609.5. The total comes out to 255.3 unique visitors per posting. The running mean, per posting, for the twelve months prior to April was 130.7 unique visitors per posting. The median was a mere 114.1 views per posting.
There were even nice results in the things that show engagement. There were 70 things liked in April, compared to the mean of 54.1 and median of 49. That’s 7.8 likes per posting, well above the mean of 4.1 and median of 4.0. There were for a wonder even more comments than average, 22 given in April compared to a mean of 18.3 and median of 18. Per-posting, that’s 2.4 comments per posting, comfortably above the 1.5 comments per posting mean and 1.2 comments per posting median. It all suggests that I’m finally finding readers who appreciate my genius, or at least style.
I have doubts, of course, because I don’t have the self-confidence to be a successful writer. But I also notice, for example, that quite a few of these views, and visitors, came in a rush from about the 12th through 16th of April. That’s significant because my humor blog logged an incredible number of visits that week. Someone on the Fandom Drama reddit, explaining James Allen’s departure from Mark Trail, linked to a comic strip I’d saved for my own plot recaps. I’m not sure that this resulted in anyone on the Fandom Drama reddit reading a word I wrote. I also don’t know how this would have brought even a few people to my mathematics blog. The most I can find is several hundred people coming to the mathematics blog from Facebook. As far as I know Facebook had nothing to do with the Fandom Drama reddit. But the coincidence is hard to ignore.
As said, I posted nine things in April. Here they are in decreasing order of popularity. This isn’t quite chronological order, even though pieces from earlier in the month have more time to gather views. It likely means something that one of the more popular pieces is a Reading the Comics post for a comic strip which has run in no newspapers since the 1960s.
- No, You Can’t Say What 6/2(1+2) Equals
- Reading the Comics, April 1, 2021: Why Is Gunther Taking Algebraic Topology Edition
- Reading the Comics, December 20, 1948: What is Barnaby’s friend’s name Edition?
- A quick reading recommendation
- Reading the Comics Follow-up: Where Else Is A Tetrahedron’s Centroid Edition
- How March 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog
- In Our Time podcast has episode on Pierre-Simon Laplace
- How do I do a matrix in WordPress LaTeX?
- There’s a new tiny sci.math archive out there
My writing plans? I do keep reading the comics. I’m trying to read more for comic strips that offer interesting mathematics points or puzzles to discuss. There’ve been few of those, it seems. But I’m burned out on pointing out how a student got a story problem. And it does seem there’ve been fewer of those, too. But since I don’t want to gather the data needed to do statistics I’ll go with my impression. If I am wrong, what harm will it do?
For each of the past several years I’ve done an A-to-Z, writing an essay for each letter in the alphabet. I am almost resolved to do one for this year. My reservation is that I have felt close to burnout for a long while. This is part of why I am posting two or even one things per week, and have since the 2020 A-to-Z finished. I think that if I do a 2021 A-to-Z it will have to be under some constraints. First is space. A 2,500-word essay lets me put in a lot of nice discoveries and thoughts about topics. It also takes forever to write. Planning to write an 800-word essay trains me to look at smaller scopes, and be easier to find energy and time to write.
Then, too, I may forego making a complete tour of the alphabet. Some letters are so near tapped out that they stop being fun. Some letters end up getting more subject nominations than I can fulfil. It feels a bit off to start an A-to-Z that won’t ever hit Z, but we do live in difficult times. If I end up doing only thirteen essays? That is probably better than none at all.
If you have thoughts about how I could do a different A-to-Z, or better, please let me know. I’m open to outside thoughts about what’s good in these series and what’s bad in them.
In April 2021 I posted 5,057 words here, by WordPress’s estimate. Over nine posts that averages 561,9 words per post. Things brings me to a total of 17,901 words for the year and an average 559 words per post for 2021.
As of the start of May I’ve posted 1,614 things here. They had gathered 131,712 views from 77,564 logged unique visitors.
If you’d like to be a regular reader here, you have options. One is, if you have an RSS reader, to follow essays from the RSS feed. If you don’t have an RSS reader but want one, good news! Sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can use their Reading/Friends page as an RSS reader. Add any RSS feed using https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn.
If you have a WordPress account, you can use the “Follow NebusResearch” button, and posts will appear in your Reader here. If you’d rather get posts in e-mail, typos and all, you can click the “Follow NebusResearch by E-mail” button.
On Twitter my @nebusj account still exists, and posts announcements of things. But Safari doesn’t want to reliably let me read Twitter and I don’t care enough to get that sorted out, so you can’t use it to communicate with me. If you’re on Mastodon, you can find me as @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed server there. Safari does mostly like and let me read that. (It has an annoying tendency to jump back to the top of the timeline. But since Mathstodon is a quiet neighborhood this jumping around is not a major nuisance.)
Thank you for reading. I hope you’re enjoying it. And if you do have thoughts for a 2021 A-to-Z, I hope you’ll share them.
nebusresearch 
Instead of writing about a term for each letter of the alphabet, you could consider using only letters that spell out a word or phrase such as LINEAR ALGEBRA, GEOMETRIC PROGRESSION, or RECREATIONAL MATHEMATICS. There would be fewer essays to write, although you might get tired of the vowels.
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Oh, that’s a spectacular idea, yes. The repetition of vowels isn’t even a problem, since (my impression is) I tend to get a lot of vowel suggestions.
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